Can You Fake a Smile Into a Real One? 3,878 People Tried

“Smile, you’ll feel better” might be the most irritating advice in the English language. It’s usually given by someone who isn’t having your day.

Annoyingly, there’s some evidence for it.

The idea that your face can influence your mood, and not only the other way round, has been argued over by psychologists for decades. A famous 1988 experiment had people hold a pen between their teeth, which forces something like a smile, and reported that they found cartoons funnier. It went into the textbooks.

Then in 2016, 17 separate laboratories tried to repeat that experiment and couldn’t get the same result. A lot of people concluded the whole idea was dead.

So a Stanford researcher, Nicholas Coles, organised something unusual: a collaboration that included both believers and sceptics, who agreed in advance on how to test it. They called it the Many Smiles Collaboration. It involved 3,878 people in 19 countries, and the results were published in Nature Human Behaviour in October 2022.

They tried three methods. The pen in the mouth. Copying the expression of a smiling actor in a photograph. And simply moving the corners of your mouth towards your ears and lifting your cheeks.

The pen gave inconsistent results. The other two methods worked. People who posed a smile reported feeling a little happier.

So does that mean the irritating advice is right?

Not quite, and the reason matters more than the headline.

The effect was real but small. Coles was clear about it: it isn’t strong enough to overcome something like depression. A posed smile nudges your mood a little, and that’s all it does.

I think that’s the most useful version of the finding, and it’s the one that usually gets lost. There are two bad ways to hear “smile and you’ll feel better.” One is to dismiss it as nonsense. The other is to turn it into a duty, so that you paste on a grin and feel like a failure when your problems are still there. That second one has a name, toxic positivity, and it does real harm, because it tells people in pain that their pain is a bad attitude.

The evidence supports something more modest. Your body and your mood are connected, and you have a little bit of influence over one through the other. If you stand up, unclench your jaw and let your face soften, it helps a bit. It won’t fix a mess, but it might make the next ten minutes slightly easier, and sometimes ten minutes is what you need.

My book is called Life’s a Mess: Finding Your Smile When Sh*t Hits the Fan. The smile in the title is something you find again once things ease, and I don’t think you can force it.

So where’s the line for you? When does “cheer up” help, and when does it make things worse?

https://www.amazon.com/Lifes-Mess-Finding-Your-Smile/dp/B0DGDFX2FG/

#Positivity, #Psychology, #Happiness, #MentalHealth, #Wellbeing, #ToxicPositivity, #Mindset, #PersonalDevelopment, #Science, #EmotionalHealth, #KizziNkwocha